Decisions
by Hanna Sedai
Summary: Oneshot. Takes place sometime during #54 The Beginning. After the war is over, Jake reflects upon his actions.


**Disclaimer: **Do I own this wonderful series? No, I do not. K.A Applegate does.

**A/N: **Yeah…not a Teen Titans update, but my first Animorphs fanfic! Now I feel like a true fan. I actually don't like writing fanfic for books because I feel that the author gives us all the info we need (I prefer writing fanfic for comic books/TV shows), but here's just a quick oneshot I pounded out in an hour. Not quite as awesome as my TT oneshots, though.

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8:07am.

People looked at him as Jake passed by, giving a him double take as he walked past them. Although perfectly capable of driving himself Jake preferred to walk, despite the stares and murmurs that followed him wherever he went. He stopped at a street corner to wait for the light to change, his hands deep in his pockets and his eyes staring at the curb.

Like the rest of the Animorphs his picture was plastered over the walls of every billboard on earth. People recognized him from afar. Some adored him. Some hated him.

In the aftermath of the final gruesome battle they were lauded as war heroes. But now that the war was over people began to retrospect upon the decisions he made.

Seventeen years old.

Legally, he should not even be able to register for the draft for another year. Before the age of twenty he had seen things and done things no one should ever have to experience. He ripped out alien throats with his tiger morph's teeth, been forced to kill to survive, and had given the order to mass murder the helpless enemy.

Jake stepped onto a crowded bus and clung to a pole, offering the last free seat to a young woman with a child.

He had a meeting with the Attorney General and General Doubleday to discuss Visser One's trial, which was scheduled to begin in a few months. A discussion about the members of the Yeerk Peace Movement would also take place. Then later tonight he was to speak with the top leaders of the Andalite home world. Jake couldn't help but feel that these meetings were pointless and boring. After everything he had seen and done life seemed boring. As he stood there, his body swaying from the motion of the bus, people began to recognize him.

Jake Berenson.

War veteran.

War criminal?

He avoided their curious glances and stared at his shoes, focusing his thoughts on more mundane things than his meeting with the Attorney General.

When he opened his mail that morning he found letters from top universities around the globe. Westpoint wanted him to come discuss tactics. College presidents offered him full-ride scholarships. Even though he wasn't an official US soldier he qualified for financial aid under the GI bill. Jake almost laughed out loud. He had almost forgotten that he should be applying to school now. It wasn't like he was doing anything else…

But what to do with his life after the war?

Jake ran through the list of schools in his head as he stepped onto the street with a crowd of people. Three years ago he would have been paranoid being so out in the open, unsure who was the enemy and who was not. Jake had every right to back away from Elfangor's gift, to turn his back on a war he didn't quite understand, but he accepted the dying Andalite's gift of morphing technology.

Decisions, decisions.

Funny how, back in the good undercover days, Jake wanted nothing more than for things to go back to normal. He wanted to play basketball with Tom again, wanted to have fun with Marco again, wanted to do so many things with his life that the Yeerks took away. Marco at least knew what to do with his life. He was happily signing movie contracts and authorizing books to fictionalize the war. Even Cassie...

Jake forced his thoughts away from her. If anything, war had brought them closer together and forced the Animorphs to act as a team. But as soon as the war ended the Animorphs split. War forced Jake to make desperate and sometimes stupid decisions, including his impromptu marriage proposal to Cassie. Yet he didn't know if he would survive the war. No one knew if they would survive.

Decisions, decisions.

Despite the awards, honors, and medals Jake felt as though he failed. His primary objective was never to win the war—although that was an added bonus—but to save his family from the Yeerk invasion.

He had failed utterly in that regard.

Rachel was dead. Tom—who from the very beginning he tried to protect—was dead. A thousand Yeerks dead in the vacuum of space. All those lives lost in the war—human, Andalite, Hork-Bajir, Taxxon, and even Yeerk—could not be replaced. Jake could not stop the nightmares from haunting him. He could never forget the horror of being trapped inside of his own body when he himself was infested.

"Murderer," a woman hissed, leaning in uncomfortably close to his face. "You're a murderer, Berenson!"

Jake looked at her, but said nothing.

For those who hadn't been infested or who weren't involved in the fighting, it was difficult to talk to them about his decision to flush the helpless Yeerks into space. Was he emotionally compromised? Sure, he was. His brother and-eventually- his parents were infested. What else did he have to lose? It was easy for outsiders to comment on a war they knew nothing about. If they had seen the things he'd seen and been in those desperate situations, they would have done the same thing.

Unauthorized biographers compared Jake to Lafayette, a young nineteen-year-old French general during the Revolutionary war. They compared him to President Truman, who had to make the difficult decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They compared him to many military heroes.

But history has a bitter sting.

Jake wondered how history would remember him. No longer would he be known as Tom's kid brother or as the loser who failed to make the basketball team. No longer known as the kid who skipped class and bombed tests for no apparent reason, since he was secretly fighting a guerilla war. He would be known as the leader of the Earth Resistance Movement, the first real and successful resistance movement against the now-destroyed Yeerk Empire.

Unlike some revolutionaries, Jake didn't have an agenda to push. He didn't inspire thousands of people to rebel or use his celebrity status to push his politics. Jake was simply…Jake. He only led a rebellion out of necessity and a desire to save the people he loved.

Tired of the stares and the murmuring, he got out at the next stop. Jake made too many decisions that he regretted. All leaders do. No one is perfect. He looked up at the blue morning sky and wondered where Tobias was these days. Jake sometimes thought that Tobias deliberately trapped himself in hawk morph so he could fly away from his problems. Jake closed his eyes and concentrated.

Passerby stopped to stare as he morphed into an eagle. In a matter of minutes the morph was complete. Jake spread his wings to catch the warm air currents. If given the chance again, he would not be a leader. The decisions he had to make scarred him emotionally. As he reflected upon on his time as an Animorph he regretted every life that he had to take and every moment his hatred for the Yeerks took over. People criticized him for his decisions during the war. Now, he couldn't even make a decision about what he wanted to do with his life.

So he decided to fly.

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**A/N: **Sigh…Animorphs got me hooked into sci-fi. I really think K.A Applegate could have gone so much deeper and so much darker with this series (not that it isn't deep, just those stupid "filler" books annoy me). It's been a while since I read the last few books, so forgive me for any wrong details.

I personally loved the trial scene from #54 and how K.A Applegate didn't quite make the series have a happy ending, because that's really what war does to people. However, that still doesn't excuse the crappy ending to the series (ram the Blade ship!).

Review!


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